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"Greater Facebook integration"

With the incredible number of issues to work on, "Facebook integration" just seems like a bit of a wayward project to me. How do we even know Facebook will be with us in 2-3 years? Did anyone notice MySpace had a similar trajectory, and then dove off the face of a cliff in terms of its user base? MySpace isn't even a social platform anymore - it's an mp3 purchasing site.

Look at all the work developers put into integrating AOL and Skype and the like into their software over the years, only to have the entire company sold and/or re-engineered in such a way as to make the earlier integration pointless.

Integrating a website into your desktop environment, no matter how popular, sounds like a recipe for disaster. With the way Google loves to kill off active projects, would anyone want to bet their life savings that Google+ will still be with us in 3 years? Is it a good idea to build Google+ integration into a desktop environment?

To say nothing of the privacy and security issues - because of course, Gnome Online Miners is now mining your Facebook account (and web browsing history) for integration into Tracker.

Unity wants to send all my searches to Amazon by default. Is KDE doing any of this silly "website integration" garbage?

What's the point behind Gnome spending resources on things like Web, Map, and Boxes? Wouldn't it be better to utilize those resources to work on more important tasks like completing the Wayland transition for example?

At first they should fix gnome shell which is usability nightmare and then, they should move to Qt like everyone else. Gnome and gtk = no future.

Too bad it's just copycat of KDE techs. Gnome is known of the NIH syndrome and they never accept better KDE counter parts, but reinvent on their own (and obviously worse). Let's see what gnome messed up this time:

Haha. I loved that one. GTK gives Gnome the opportunity to do design driven development and add niftfy features. Popovers happened in a couple of months. KDE can't do anything like that. Just look at the slooooow migration to Qt5 and the decoupled KF, SC and plasma.

Why pick a commercial CLA tool kit when you can have your own much more suitable tool kit with a sane API?

I'll bite. Popovers are a feature now? Just like attached modal dialogs?

Also, why is KDE decoupling into a core/apps setup a bad thing?

Finally, what does the migration time of KDE have to do with anything? They are completely rewriting the desktop in Qt5 not adding popovers to Gedit. It takes time.

We were talking about GTK. It is a damn nice thing that GTK answers to Gnome, not to some commercial bean counters who cares more about blackberries than anything Free Linux. Gnome can decide to start using popovers and they can flesh out an API in a few months. KDE have to wait years and adapt to whatever some former Qt owners find good for business some time ago.

Can you se the difference? Gnome is acting through GTK. KDE is reacting to tool kit changes they can't control in Qt.

I got that part. My point was all of that control and ability and it amounts to popover windows. While they are nice to look at, I'd hardly call them a revolutionary new feature.

Also I see the control of the toolkit as an entirely different point to what was originally posted. There has been a big uptake in the use of Qt vs GTK. Unless I am mistaken the original post about Gnome and GTK not having a future was referencing this uptake in Qt. We can debate the merits of Qt and its licensing, but it doesn't change the fact that there is a lot more Qt use out there. To some that spells bad news for GTK and by extension Gnome.

GTK gives Gnome the opportunity to do design driven development and add niftfy features. Popovers happened in a couple of months.

I'm not trying to split hairs here, but that makes it sound very much like you are equating nifty features with things like popovers.

I'm also not debating the health of GTK. I was simply pointing out that there is a lot of visible uptake of Qt. I'm not really concerned with Gnome vs KDE at the toolkit level. My original point was to question calling things like popovers features. To me popovers are no more a feature than wobbly windows were when Compiz came out.

The popovers are a great example of design driven development. The time spent from concept, to GTK API, to app implementations, to release was a few months. The popovers ended up adding new features to apps. Do you agree to this?

Everything except the new features part. Popovers are at best very pretty drop downs/contextual menus. To me that's not a new feature, it's just an arguably nicer (read eye candy) way of doing something that has been a core part of most desktop UI's for a good long while.

Also, popovers being a great example of design driven development is not important to the main point. It might certainly be true, but if the end result is something that isn't really a new feature, just a combination of several current aspects of the UI rolled together and slightly re-factored the design process that went into it isn't wholly relevant to the main point.

To me a new feature either brings some type of new functionality or is something that takes something we already have that either is showing age or deficiency and jumps it forwards several notches.